The God of Literary Trends

"You know, you really should be looking for the next Arundhati Roy."

I plucked at the phone cord wrapped around my neck, sighed, and said, "Oh, absolutely."

It was 1998, and I was working at a publishing company that had just launched an imprint featuring "the writing of women of all colors." It was my internly task to call independent booksellers across the country to find out what and whom they thought we should publish. Their advice inevitably boiled down to variations on one response: "That Indian subcontinent is really hot. Oh, oops, do you say 'South Asia' now?"

"Nah, our customers don't really like stuff in translation. But have you read that Jhumpa ... "

Yes, yes, yes.

Literary brown ladies were the new new thing. Arundhati Roy's poetic, multilayered novel "The God of Small Things" had just garnered the Booker Prize. Jhumpa Lahiri would debut in 2000 with "Interpreter of Maladies," her collection of elegantly written short stories that went on to win a Pulitzer. But Roy and Lahiri were just the beginning of what was to become a craze for South Asian and South Asian-American women's writing.

Of course, this wasn't the first time the publishing world had found its newest darlings in female writers of color. And it wasn't the first time bookstores would create pretty displays of books by authors of a "hot" ethnicity, or the first time readers would strip those displays as neatly as ants eating a sandwich at a picnic. The early '90s saw an explosion of Latina narratives a la Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate." And Terry McMillan's success with "Waiting to Exhale" in the mid-'90s ushered in a rash of books in which middle-class black women griped about their no-'count men.

Color has become a marketing boon.

Interviewers probe into a writer's upbringing, seeking out ethnic factoids for a voracious public. Details about unusual foods, struggles with immigrant parents, and cultural oddities are all fair game. And in the case of attractive authors, whose images are emblazoned all over magazines and poster-size publicity photos, one can hardly be sure what is for sale anymore -- the "company" of a beautiful, exotic woman or the power of her words.

The Importance of Being Exotic

What is it that makes a certain ethnic genre hot? If I could nail that one down for sure, I'd be rolling around in a room filled with nothing but money. But one can hazard some guesses.

Many of the Asian-American and Latina books had lots of incense and spirits -- "ancient Asian wisdom" and religious tidbits, or mystical realism in the form of pissed-off ghosts and fantastic visions. They also featured nearly pornographic discussions of food; Isabel Allende's "Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses" even had recipes. The mystical stuff and the food seem to reflect the reasons why some white people are drawn to different cultures -- either in search of religious or spiritual enlightenment, or to exhibit their open-minded adventuresome selves by eating our food. Our cultures are tagged as "better" somehow -- closer to the earth, purer, more attuned to sensory pleasure -- but in nice, non-threatening ways, wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom or duck tamales.

The doyenne, the matriarch, the empress dowager of all women-of-color literary trends is Amy Tan. The success of "Joy Luck Club" prompted a flood of Asian-American novels, whose "exotic" content was mirrored in their titles. Asian-American women's fiction titles often featured either: a) some nature-related motif to show that we are in touch with the elements (Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden," Mia Yun's "House of the Winds"), b) a familial relationship that displays how wonderfully traditional we are (Tan's "The Bonesetter's Daughter," "The Kitchen God's Wife"), c) or the number 100 or 1000 which demonstrates that we are an ancient, wise people fond of the fairy-tale trick of enumerating knowledge. (Yoshikawa's "One Hundred and One Ways," Tan's "The Hundred Secret Senses"). Some titles even double up on these themes, such as Mira Stout's "One Thousand Chestnut Trees."